There Are Too Many Books: What Happened to Publishing’s Summer Break?

I’ve written so much about how there are too many books and not enough places to cover them, but I still have more to say. So this time I thought I’d go deeper and do a case study. Last year I wrote about the wonderful and terrible overstuffedness of the month of March 2024. This time, instead of looking at a whole month, let’s just look at one single day that broke my brain and compelled me to make a spreadsheet about it: June 3, 2025.

According to my spreadsheet, there are 29 books published this week alone that I want to read. Realistically I hope I will get to read four or five of them, and I read books for a living. So far I’ve read and loved two: Flashlight by Susan Choi and Dry Season by Melissa Febos. Both are authors I’ve read before and deeply admire, so I was already primed to enjoy their new ones.

But that leaves so many others! I realized after I started writing this post that my list and the list of 26 new titles that Lit Hub ran on Tuesday have many variations. So let’s say that there are more than 30 exciting books published this week. How do we begin to know about them all, let alone celebrate them all and (gasp) even read them?

Maybe I’m particularly sensitive at this moment in time, given that my new book comes out in less than a month. The summer book preview lists that I didn’t make weigh heavily on me, even though I appeared on a good bunch of them! But there are hundreds of books coming out this summer, thousands if you count smaller presses and self-published works. Let’s not count gen AI-created books in that figure, not now or ever. Inevitably I will have left out some of the books that were also published on June 3 and their authors will feel sad and for that I apologize profusely. I know how it feels!

I’m reading as fast as I can. I can’t help but feel responsible to know about all of these books and tell you about them, even though I’m just one person.

How did this happen? That isn’t a rhetorical question; I’ve really been asking around and I’m not quite sure I have the answer. I know that summer reading has always been popular, so June is an excellent time to publish books. And I also know that the first week of each month is usually the most jam packed with new releases. I know too that on the first Tuesday in June of 2024 there were 15 new books that I was excited about (I may not get to read all the books that interest me but I keep great records of them), so June has not always been this overflowing.

Of the 29 books I’ve picked out for June 3, thirteen are fiction, four are debuts, and only six are from publishers outside the Big Five. Of the 29 books, only one, Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid, is currently in the Top 100 on Amazon (not that I’m saying you should buy books at Amazon, but their sales rankings are at least a good barometer for what’s popular).

I remember when Amazon was new and primarily a bookstore and not an evil megacorporation that exemplified the worst of capitalism. I remember when it felt so exciting that you could buy any book you wanted at any time on this magical website. Big box bookstores had physical size limitations but Amazon let you dream bigger, read more widely.

In 2006 journalist Chris Anderson published a book called The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, in which he envisioned a world where stores like Amazon would allow entertainment retail to no longer be so hit-focused: “As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture)… If the 20th-century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.”

Oh how I wish Anderson’s vision had come true! Instead, corporate consolidation and aversion to risk taking has left us more dependent on hits than ever before. As Kyle Chayka wrote about the dominance of the monoculture in Vox in 2019, “We thought the long tail of the internet would bring diversity; instead we got sameness and the perpetuation of the oldest biases.”

There are so many wonderful new books out this week, but the  biggest one will likely be The First Gentleman, a collaboration between Bill Clinton and James Patterson that is now #10 on Amazon and was almost certainly written by ghost writers. Its inevitable appearance on the New York Times bestseller list will generate more sales for it.

It was not on my list at all.